Touched - By Cyn Balog Page 0,3

thanks. I didn’t see. I, um …,” she babbled, all the while forcing me to the sad recognition that this girl was intensely sweet and shy and everything I would look for if I didn’t know I was destined to marry a redheaded nurse named Sue from Philly in ten years. Except, I realized as my memories shuffled at a maddening speed, that outcome was gone forever. Sue existed somewhere, still, but she’d probably never be with me. And now my crash-and-burn with this girl was inevitable. I’d lost two hot girls in one morning.

Without warning, I smelled apples laced with cinnamon, like someone was baking pies nearby. I could almost taste them. My salivary glands kicked into overdrive and my mouth began to water. Then, suddenly, the memory disappeared. Whoosh. Gone.

The girl was trying to tell me about how she was new in town. It was where any normal guy would say something like “Where are you from?” or “Can I show you around?”, but instead, my eyes bulged, heavy, and I couldn’t bring myself to raise them higher than her perfectly shaped ankles. To top it all off, I felt drool bubbling over my bottom lip. Awesome. Just my luck. Why couldn’t she just leave? Leave now, but come back later so we could continue this conversation at a time when I wasn’t cycling, when I felt more normal? But for me, abnormal was normal. I’d been fooling myself, thinking I could change who I was.

Suddenly I saw craft paper and a paperback romance novel and water dripping on hardwood. Fear curdled in my body. A scream bloomed in my throat but came out as a muffled moan. A jolt of pressure rocketed through my eyeballs, seeming to slice them in half. I pushed my palms hard against my eye sockets. “No. No. No!”

Most girls ran screaming from me, but this girl wouldn’t leave. Perfect. She put her hands on her knees, and though I couldn’t see her face, I knew she was squinting at me like I was some experiment gone horrifically wrong. “Are you having an aneurysm?”

“No, I’ll be …” Another jab in my eye, and then a picture

Me, screaming flashed in front of my eyes. My next word was a muffled groan—“Fine”—because another memory was fighting against the rage of others, floating to the surface kissing soft lips, blond curls in my eyes and giving me a warm, tense feeling between my legs. What? I get to kiss her? Seriously? I was drooling in front of her, for God’s sake. I hadn’t completely ruined things with her with this moronic display? Just as I inwardly started to celebrate I caught another … it is unexpected tragedy that brings us together today the unexpected is often the most difficult to deal with and clenched my fists. Sure, in the future I’d perfected, there were funerals. But nothing horrible. My mother wouldn’t go until she was in her sixties. And my last official memory was digging for sand crabs in the surf with my grandson—I could even feel the ache of my bones with that memory, so I had to have been old. My poor grandson. That little blond kid. He was gone now, cast into dreamland with the others. God, I’d loved him. When I was young, I’d always hoped that when I cycled away from an outcome, all the progeny I remembered wouldn’t just disappear forever, that they’d have a chance to exist somewhere, with other families, like Sue. The more kids and grandkids I recycled, though, the less I believed that was true. Every time the experiences started to shuffle, I felt like I was murdering them.

Murderer! You killed her!

The words sliced through my head. I smelled something sour and felt a hot breath on my neck. The voice was so vicious and the memory so vivid, I thought it was real; I looked around and saw a small crowd of a dozen or so people in bathing suits, carrying their beach chairs and towels, staring at me. But no one was standing close by accusing me of being a killer. I would have wondered where the hell that came from if I hadn’t already known. The weirdest and most unimaginable things only came from one place: the land of the yet-to-be.

I shuddered and gripped my head tightly in my hands. “Green elephant,” I muttered under my breath.

She leaned forward. Apples again. Her hair smelled like apples. I inhaled deeply, feasting on the smell,